Politics has been an ever-present and disturbing part of our lives since 2016.
Politics was ever-present before that, it’s ever present in human society, it’s just that some privileged middle class people choose to ignore it and largely succeed when their NPR ASMR isn’t blasting them with “ORANG MAN BAD” every hour of the day to brow beat them into caring.
It was not, but I’m not going to sit here and argue with a kid about things I lived through. And no, I wasn’t middle-class, I was deeply poor.
Perhaps you’re conflating “the electoral dog and pony show” for “politics” then, because if you were “deeply poor,” it’s hard to imagine not dealing with politics. Easy example, the cops are a pretty political institution, acting as the agents of establishment powers. Hell, the enclosure of the commons and the resultant practically monopolistic effect that landlording has is also pretty political, liberals just don’t talk about it (other than Adam Smith).
It wasn’t shoved in our faces 24 hours per day. Of course we were affected by the laws which govern us, but outside of much shorter election cycles, the government wasn’t something that normal people discussed every day, all day. The politicians did their things in the background and we lived our lives. You cannot understand how exhausting this new reality is unless you’ve experienced what it was like before what you referred to as “the dog and pony show”.
